GOVERNOR Ralph DLG Torres on Thursday said he will deliver his State of the Commonwealth Address or SOCA after the Nov. 8 election.
Based on the CNMI Constitution, Torres said, “I don’t need to have a joint session” with the Legislature.
He said some members of the House leadership complained because they were not personally invited to the SOCA when it was first set for Oct. 21, 2022, at the Kensington Hotel.
“By protocol, I wrote a letter to the speaker of the House, the Senate president, the chief justice, and the presiding judge, and they disseminated the information” to the other members of their branches, the governor added.
“Because they complained that they were not [personally] invited, I did not do the SOCA on Oct. 21. I told them I’d do it on the 31st, and that they were invited, but they said they didn’t want me to deliver the SOCA before the election,” Torres said.
“They say it’s ‘politicizing.’ That was not their original complaint. The original complaint was that they were not invited. All I want is to give both houses [of the Legislature] and the people of the Commonwealth an opportunity to hear the state of the CNMI. But there was an impasse, so I decided to postpone the SOCA.”
The governor did not provide a specific new date for his SOCA.
The Democrat-Independent-led House wanted him to deliver the SOCA on Dec. 1, 2022, in the House chamber while the Republican-led Senate granted the governor’s request to deliver his SOCA on Oct. 31, 2022, at Kensington
